New year, but the chattering class' ennui already kicking in

Jewish World Review ^ | Jan. 6, 2005 | Bernadette Malone

[SJackson]

Out with Homeland Security for 2004, in with Social Security, declared the liberal and silly Washington Post on the front page of its Style section on New Year's day.

That kind of elitist foolishness — the ennui the chattering class holds for the War on Terror and the cat-and-mouse games that never seem to produce Osama Bin Laden, weapons of mass destruction, or terrorists on Air France flights — is exactly what typifies the Democratic Presidential field.

Enough diddling around in Tikriti spider holes, they complain. Eighty-seven billion dollars for what, they ask? Bush is embarrassing Americans abroad with all his saber rattling, they groan. On to more important things at home, Dean — and to a lesser extent, Kerry and Clark — sigh.

Domestic issues remain important, but would Washington, New York, and other American metropolises have escaped the holiday season without a terrorist attack if the War on Terror's biggest critic, Howard Dean, had been President this year?

Howard Dean, who sent a signal of naivete around the world the day after Christmas when he told the media he is resisting "pronouncing a sentence before guilt is found," by a trial on Osama Bin Laden? Dean, for whom September 11 seems to have become an academic question better left for the international legal community of pseudo-scholars?

Can anyone voting for Dean actually believe he will do more for homeland security than George W. Bush, or are Dean's supporters those who are simply bored with homeland security's endless warnings and costs?

...snip...

Had Dean been President in 2003, the only visible sign that he was fighting the War on Terror might have been barefoot old white ladies hobbling through airport metal detectors. And perhaps another attack.

The War on Terror will take as long as the Cold War, experts have said, and will require the same amount of determination to win.

Ronald Reagan was criticized by Democrats for spending so much money on defense during the 1980s and taking too hard a line with our enemies, but his policy broke the back of the Soviet Union.

George W. Bush now faces the same criticism Reagan did — from the same quarters of liberalism. It's a very good thing Howard Dean and the Washington Post weren't prosecuting the Cold War, and it would be a very bad thing if they were prosecuting this current war.

[Imal]

I always had a difficult time understanding how such a thing as the Democratic Party could possibly exist in the United States.

Then someone pointed out to me that the average IQ is 100.